Julian Symons; British Mystery Writer

Prize-winning mystery writer Julian Symons, whose novels include “The Color of Murder” and “The Progress of a Crime,” has died at age 82.

His family announced Tuesday that he died Saturday.

Two of Symons’ 26 novels won the Crime Writers Assn. Critics Award and the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Allan Poe Award.

Symons was more interested in the tangled psychology of killers, victims and investigators than in leading readers through the genre’s traditional crime-solving puzzles.

“Up to 1943 almost all crime writers . . . viewed criminals as objects, as wicked ciphers. . . . Things are very different today. The criminal can now be the most interesting character of the lot,” he said in an interview.

From 1958 to 1959, he chaired the Crime Writers Assn., which he helped found. He succeeded mystery writer Agatha Christie as president of the Detection Club of writers after her death in 1976.

Symons, who had a strong following in the United States, was a visiting professor at Amherst College in Massachusetts in 1975-76.

The son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, he stammered as a child and was sent to a school for special education. His real education began when he started reading books, encouraged by his author-brother, A.J.A. Symons.

Symons became a Trotskyist and a poet. After World War II army service, he became an advertising copywriter and began reviewing books for the Manchester Evening News.

In 1990, he received the Cartier Diamond Dagger Award for his achievements.

He once told an interviewer: “The thing that absorbs me most in our age is the violence behind respectable faces.” He cited “the judge speaking with passion about the need for capital punishment” and “the quiet obedient boy who kills for fun.”

He is survived by his wife and their son.